Found in Albert E. Cowdrey's novelette, "Animal Magnetism," in the
current (June) issue of F&SF.

Words I Did Not Know, Dept., part 2

Dog. n. A domesticated
carnivorous mammal (Canis familiaris) related to the foxes and
wolves and raised in a wide variety of breeds.

Okay, I knew the word 'dog'. But 'dog' is actually a more interesting
word than I realized. Because we don't know where it comes from.

English is, of course, a Germanic language, within the Indo-European
language family. Most of our words are either Germanic, or
post-Conquest borrowings
from other I-E languages like French and Latin.

But 'dog' has
no known I-E root. It's found in Old English, but before then,
all is darkness. Most terms for 'dog' in Indo-European languages derive
from Proto-Indo-European *kwon,
from which came
both the Latin canis (and its
Romance derivatives) and the Germanic hund,
and its derivatives, e.g., 'hound'. But where did 'dog' come from? It's
speculated that 'dog' came from some non-I-E language that the Germanic
peoples came in contact with during their Bronze Age. No one knows what
that language might have been.

See, Goatse doesn't bother me that much. Nor does Tubgirl. But now
Green Lantern's scrotal raphe has been burned into my brain forever,
and I will always feel soiled. Damn you, Internets. The abyss has
stared
into me.

The right/inner radical means 'group of pigs
moving'. It is composed of the Non-General Use character meaning 'pig',
and 'out of' (八). Left/outer radical is 'move'. The jostling of pigs in
a group came to mean 'attaining a goal through the brute force of the
group'. Now it means 'attain' in general. Henshall
suggests taking the top element of the right radicals in its meaning as
'eight',
and as a
mnemonic: 'Eight moving pigs finally
attain goal.'